I am tickled pink to announce Andreessen Horowitz’s participation
in a new project called the Glass Collective.

Along with our friends at Google Ventures and our old partners in
crime at Kleiner Perkins, we are working with Google to encourage
a new generation of startup entrepreneurs to build applications
for Google’s new breakthrough Glass platform.

First, Google Glass itself: Glass is a new wearable computing product and
platform being developed by Google.

The thesis of Glass is profoundly transformational — to integrate
connectivity and information directly into your field of vision
and into your normal daily life. Instead of having a phone in
your pocket or a tablet in your briefcase, why not have the
Internet in your field of vision when you want it — and why not
feed the Internet with live video and audio that matches what you
see and hear at any time.

This provocative idea has already inspired a huge explosion of
speculation and debate in the technology industry. In situations
like this, I always look to history for analogies to try to
understand how people are going to come to grips with new
technology. One obvious historical analogy is the web browser,
which is 20 years old this year — both the browser and Google
Glass are windows into the Internet that everyone will be able to
use.

But I’d rather reference another transformational technology that
is also 20 years old this year. At the same time we were
introducing the browser in 1993, Steven Spielberg released his
magnum opus, the film Jurassic Park. For those of us who had
worked in 3D computer graphics in the years prior, Jurassic Park
was a stupendous breakthrough — the dream of computer
graphics truly come to life in a stunningly visceral and
emotionally overwhelming way.

In a newly published oral history of Jurassic Park, Spielberg
and his producing partner Kathleen Kennedy tell this delightful
story:

KENNEDY: I remember getting the phone call where Dennis [their
animation genius] said, “I think I have something you and Steven
should take a look at.” We saw this wire-frame model of a
dinosaur running across the screen, and it caused five or six of
us to literally leap to our feet –because it was so extraordinary
and –significantly beyond anything we had seen in [animation] up
to that point.

SPIELBERG: The last time my jaw dropped like that was when George
Lucas showed me the shot of the Imperial cruiser [in Star Wars].
I showed it to [stop-motion effects legend] Ray Harryhausen. He
was absolutely enthralled and very –positive about the paradigm
changing. He looked at the test and said, “Well, that’s the
future.”

When it comes to Google Glass in the context of the Internet, I’m
like Ray Harryhausen: Well, that’s the future.

Now, of course, a lot of work remains to be done between today
and the full realization of the Glass vision. The exciting part
about today’s announcement of the Glass Collective is that just
like with the Internet and smartphones, a huge amount of that
work will be done by third-party developers, who are going to
have in Glass a brand new platform and springboard for creativity
to play with. All of us involved in the Glass Collective are
absolutely certain that developers are going to create thousands
of ways for millions of people to use Glass and improve their
lives and the world around them.

And so with the Glass Collective, we are open for business
(glasscollective@a16z.com) to seed fund startups to build the
first generation of amazing Glass applications.